- Qunnect lands $10M in fresh funding from Cisco and other investors to advance real-world quantum applications
- The startup specializes in room-temperature quantum networking hardware
- Quantum has plenty of profit potential but making the tech user-friendly remains a challenge
Quantum networking startup Qunnect is striving to push quantum out into the real world, and some fresh new cash could help speed that along.
The company, which operates two quantum network testbeds in New York and Berlin (the latter in collaboration with DT), raised $10 million in new funding led by Airbus Ventures, Cisco and VC firm Quantonation.
The money will fuel the development of new quantum network use cases across multiple sectors, Qunnect said, such as finance, energy infrastructure, telecom and defense.
Cisco’s contribution is “extremely empowering for all of us who have been trying to build towards a vision of quantum networking being real,” Qunnect CEO Noel Goddard told Fierce.
The key behind Qunnect’s hardware is that it can operate at room temperature, which he noted is a stark difference from most quantum tech that requires near absolute zero conditions. Quantum computing is primarily confined to laboratory settings, and that won’t cut it for networking applications.
Data centers today “don’t have any cryogenics in them, they don’t have any of this exotic support hardware to make quantum work,” Goddard explained. That's how Qunnect garnered interest from the likes of Cisco.
Cisco's quantum push
Cisco is undertaking its own quantum computing foray, via its Outshift incubation unit and a new quantum research facility in California. It recently unveiled a prototype quantum entanglement chip that, like Qunnect’s tech, works at room temps and on existing fiber infrastructure.
Quantum entanglement is when a pair of photons are essentially linked no matter how far apart they are from each other. It’s an important aspect of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), which allows two parties to securely exchange encryption keys. QKD that uses entangled pairs is a “provably secure protocol,” Goddard said, unlike single-photon QKD methods, which historically had security gaps and issues operating over long distances.
The cool thing about entangled photons is they can allow you to “talk to” quantum computers, sensors and other types of quantum devices.
“None of that is possible with the first generation QKD that was really meant to be more like a walkie-talkie,” he added.
No easy path to quantum adoption
Quantum networking moves from Cisco, Qunnect and others reflect a rising tide in potential profit. McKinsey predicts the quantum communications market could reach $14.9 billion by 2035, driven by growing demand from both the public and private sectors.
But preparing quantum tech for everyday use remains a pressing pain point. Especially getting hardware “into the hands of users,” said Goddard.
Current quantum computers require “teams of PhDs to maintain,” so they’re not user-friendly for the typical network engineer. The goal is to eventually make quantum hardware as compact as say, an internet router you’d get from an ISP.
“We already have equipment that works well” but it needs to be “industry-hardened” so Cisco and other companies can benefit from it, he explained.
“Same with the software. You want it to be at a level where it always works, everything is turnkey, everything is low maintenance,” Goddard concluded.